one of the strong points today which is one of the reasons why i'm an advocate for the european central bank to drop interest rates which would, i think, push the euro lower and help on exports. i think it always hangs out there, you know, that's the biggest argument why greece should leave the euro. i do not see that you're going to have the two-tiered or three-tiered system. ..

because if you don't show there's growth potential -- i should say portugal increased its experts substantially, -- exports substantially. you have to be competitive. you have to have deregulation. those are even more important than a devaluation, because a devaluation only last so long, whereas if you make the structural changes -- this is going to be a challenge for -- you had 14 of these stimulus programs since the late 1990s in japan, and none of them have really done the job. so you have to bundle this up in a packet, and put them through. so that's the best way i can

answer you. i think that where europeans have fallen down -- goes back to the questions we already had -- they didn't put the emphasis on being competitive. they didn't put the emphasis on driving the fiscal side and the monetary said and looked the other way. now they're paying the price, but so is the world. >> ladies and gentlemen, i'm afraid -- i've got the bad job of having to say, i think we better hold it there on this one. and what an outstanding presentation. not only are you an outstanding world leader, you're the banker to the world. [applause]

>> i was trying to find a new lens, a knew way of studying

presidential, which. 12 years ago i wrote other book on the first laid yes and thought it would be important to understand the president from a different angle. why not study the person that now them the best? for example, what possibly could i, as an historian, contribute to the body of knowledge on lincoln or george washington? pretty much everything that could be written about lincoln or washington probably has been written. the greatest historians have spent years pouring through the evidence to produce this book on lincoln or washington. so my thought was, eureka, why that look at the person that knew them the best, the first laids. >> historyanses have largely ignored the role of the first lady, as they have largely ignored the role of mistresses in shaping the man. why? i suspect a lot of my colleagues tend to be older men, educated in a certain way that didn't study such matters and most historians were not educated in

the matter office -- matters of the heart and the hearth. but by studying the first ladies -- the first think thomas jefferson did after spending 1 days cooped up in a loft outside of philadelphia, writing the declaration of independence, the first thing he did was he went shopping for martha, his wife. he was pregnant and had had a miscarriage, and he bought her some gloves. then he begged off from serving for the rest of the summer so he could go home to be with his wife. every within -- every interof -- every winter of the revolutionary war, there was martha washington. i propose washington's closer

advisor was alexander hamilton, and one chapter talks about hamilton's history of womanizing, bill clinton was not the first and was not the worst when it comes to misbehavior and high office. there's a long history. itot spitzer, arnold schwarzenegger, david petraeus, had nothing on alexander hamilton. if you read letters written by martha washington during those winter camps, she was like a soldier. she didn't complain about in the weather or the harsh conditions. she did complain about one thing. there was a tom cat one winter that was misbehaving with the lacy cats and it was noisy, and she nicknamed the tom cat alexander hamilton because of all the young girls. i had a few years ago about the presidents at ease. what do they eat? what hobbies do they have?

what are their fears and hopes and what are they like as fathers and husbands? how did their kids turn out. another way of assessing presidential character, providing us with another lens. we're all still trying to figure out dick nixon. he liked to bowl alone and sometimes wore a black suit to do it. that begins to explain things, right? who does this? so, i guess all books end up being trilogies, so here's the en. affairs of state, i try to take a different perspective on our presidents, and for example, we all know about george washington. but we study washington at yorktown. what brilliance. we study washington's courage and dashing crossing of the delware on christmas night, which saved the revolution. but who was george washington's girlfriends when he was a kid? and you find that washington

boys basically goes back home in tear because he was turn down and turned to paper and wrote poems. he once wrote a dart has been thrown house hi heart when another girl turned him down. so during any studies me, professors didn't tell me about washington's teenage girlfriends. it provides us with a knew -- new way of understanding presidents. we all know our countries leaders have often times been shaped by the hands of a woman, often a mother, offer a wife, and sometimes that of the mistress as well. it's in the newsed to, general david petraeus is still dominating the headlines with hi alleged affair and misbehavior. related to the book.

what my first thought when that's happened to petraeus, was during world war ii, general eisenhower was having a long-term fair with an attractive young british driver named kate. what general hires a woman to be his maid. imagine if eisenhower's affair with kate somersby came out in world war ii, and as happened to pet at any rate, what would happen if we got rid of ike before d-day. during the depression, franklin roosevelt was having affairs. his personal aide and secretary and cook and dresser, and undresser, apparently, too. what if we found out about fdr's misbehavior and if we threw him

out of office, and demanded his resignation, as the economy is recovering? all the way back to the french and indian war. a very young george washington was writing very romantic letters to a woman who was not mrs. washington. her name was sally fairfax. a very attractive, older, sophisticated neighbor. what if washington's letters had become public during the french and unanimous war or the revolutionary war? much as petraeus' e-mails became public? and what if we got rid of george washington? so bill clinton is not the first and not the worst. petraeus is not the first and not the worst. been there done that. there's a long history of it. in fact, it pains me to say that even abraham lincoln visited prostitutes. i know, say it isn't so but it happened. the details on it are sketch y, there's not a lot of letters written. but lincoln's best friend was

joshua speed, and speed was perhaps as dashing and as handsome and as lucky with the ladies as lincoln was allegedly unlucky in romance. and speed felt sorry for lincoln, always calmed one another by their last names, speed, and lincoln. speed invited lincoln to work at his general floor, and speed didn't have a place to say, so lincoln let speed stay upstairs, and during the friendship, speed was using the services of a professional woman. okay? and you imagine lincoln upstairs, with a pillow over his head, trying to mind his own business as speed is doing his business. and lincoln basically says to speed, i have to have a woman. it's been too long. and here's what appears to have happened. only abraham lincoln would do this. lincoln asked steve for a letter of introduction with a

professional woman, and i don't me agriculture. it was an occupation that predated agriculture. what we have pieced together is lincoln visited the prostitute and he had maybe three dollars with him, which was a lot of money. not eliot spitzer money, but a pretty fair amount of money. and the prostitute apparently charges lincoln five bucks. which was an enormous amount of money. so lincoln says to her, ma'am, i have to tell you, -- honest abe. he says i cap afford it. eye only have the. she knows speed to it's a possible he could pay her when he gets the money. he doesn't have the movement we know that either, a., because lincoln got embarrassed or, b., his honor got the best of him, but once she said to lincoln you can pay me later or maybe this one is on the house, lynn ran -- lincoln ran out the door. so it was not a happy ending, it was a good ending.

so what i thought i'd do for the main body of my remarks today is tell you just a couple of my favorite stories, not just about mistresses in history but more important lip -- importantly about presidential character. there's some juicy stories. one involveds grover cleveland. now, when grover cleveland was a young man there was a controversy because cleveland fathered a child out of wedlock, but the woman named maria hallpin from pennsylvania, might have been a prostitute, at the least she was very casual about her relationships. now, cleveland was a bachelor, and is running in he 1880s and the 1890s, so fathering a child out of wed look was a big to-do at the time. and it was such a big to-do for other reasons. one was that the republican opponents of cleveland that were

backing the republican nominee, and a group of very righteous preachers starred a campaign that no one in the country escapes, long your doors, dracula is here, cleveland is prowling the street, debaching young men. an aggressive campaign attacking cleveland. so i became a huge story because day wouldn't let it go one of the things that saved cleveland, it turns out that james g. blaine likely had more affairs and his wife miraculously gave birth six months after their married. so blaine was heaping this condemnation on cleveland, and the one thing we like less is a hypocritical politician. so i blew back on bottom line. another scandal was this. the republicans were pushing this issue, and they would have a little -- kind of a jingle, a

little song, a rhyme they could do. they i would into, ma, ma, where is my pa? then cleveland0s orphan, love child. when cleveland finally wins the presidency, the democrats complete that little song by saying, ma, ma, where is my pa, going to the white house, ha-ha-ha. what made it a scandal was this. grover cleveland's best friend and law partner was a guy named oscar pole sound. and cleveland spent most of his career in buffalo, the mayor and governor of you. he was a lawyer and he and oscar folsom were partners. they would drink and eat together, and it appears they also enjoyed the services of maria hallpin together. so, when maria hallpin gets pregnant, she has a son, and

neither oscar foalson nor grover cleveland knew who the father was, and maria complicates things by naming the child oscar cleveland. so oscar folsom had a marriage and had a temperature. cleveland was a bachelor so kind of accepted the responsibility to pay for the child. here's the other part of the scandal. oscar folsom dies a few years later in a carriage accident. driving his carriage, recklessly thrown from it. breaks his neck. leaves a widow and this young girl francis. grover cleveland makes an enormous amount of money as his law partner, and cleveland takes care of the widow and the young girl, he pay for them. sets them up in a nice home for his best friend and former law partner. he becomes a godfather the little girl, she calls him uncle cleave. that sounds creepy. he calls her frankie. he pays to send her to college.

she goes to wells college in a day and age when women weren't really educated. what happens is as frances is growing up, cleveland's relationship with her changes. changes from the godfather to a romantic interest. cleveland starts sending her letters with poems and sends her roses, and it's the full court press on courting her. >> booktv is on the road in philadelphia at the university of pennsylvania, and we're interview something professors who also happen to be authors. we want to introduce you to the dean of the university of pennsylvania school of social policy and practice, this is richard geller on your screen, and one of his books is called, the third lie. why government programs don't work and a blueprint for change. doctors gellous, i'm here from the government and i'm here to help you.

is that not true? >> not true. >> host: why not? na because most government social programs, which is designed to help people, don't actually help. in some instances, it is little more than the -- i hate saying this -- the do-gooder full employment act. provides lots of jobs to people who would like to help. but the end of the day, if you look at whether the needle has been moved, and people have really been helped by substantial government programs and substantial amounts of money, the bottom line is very rarely are people helped. and i thought that was a story worth telling. the idea came to me as i was being smuggled into the back door of the state house in the state of hawai'i for a meeting with the secretary -- the speaker of the house. hawaii was spending half a

billion dollars a year on special education. part of that was subsidized by the federal government under the individuals with disabilities education act. the rest was being paid for by the taxpayers of hawai'i. and we had been there for about two years. to see whether the half a billion dollars was actually helping special education children. and we had gone through 500 files, and we had discovered almost no help. lots of services were being provided. lots of money was being diverted in inappropriate ways. the commissioner of education for the state of hawai'i had given a $250,000 grant to someone on the big island to run a special education program, who her last job was hula dancer. that seemed a little odd at face value, and turned out not surprisingly she was having a sexual relationship with the commissioner. people giving 30, 4 ,

$50,000 grants for horseback riding. and i wouldn't have written the book if i thought that was an isolated case. but i had been in the field of social policy for 40 years, and i ken seeing this happen again and again and again, and i said, you know? maybe it's time to tell the story. that the social programs that people argue about, that they don't want to cut the funding for, that are sacred cows, in fact do not do a whole lot of good. head start, i'm sure i made no friends when i started a chapter by saying head start is an $8 billion cram, clearly a sacred cow, nobody wants to cut it, never in the debate, and pretty all of the positive educational effects of head start are gone by the time the children get the third grade. >> host: why is that? >> guest: because the head start program itself only deals with educational readiness. it doesn't deal with the underlying social problems that affect the kids who are

means-tested eligible in head start. that was the key. the key to why a lot of these programs don't work is they are target programs based on some sort of income eligibility or special eligibility, and an enormous amount of funding and energy goes into the means testing, and eligibility testing, leaving very little money for the actual program. so the programs end up being low dose, very minimal, and they're not sufficient to change the educational outcomes of children. just providing head start program doesn't deal with the fact they're coming from violent homes, violent neighborhoods, poverty, homelessness, food insufficiency. you can't overcome those kind of deficits by providing head start education program. so, that's where the book began.

and most of the people advised me said, well, it's a very interesting book. i'm sure you'll get on fox tv. and that was not my goal. my goal was not be a critics so i said let me do part two and say, there are some social programs that are fight effective. and maybe we can learn a lesson from them. and the big quiz that -- in the course of writing the book i conducted, and bored to death my wife and my children, was, let me sit down with anybody i know and tell me the three government programs that have been the most effective in, say, the last 65 years. almost every one modify academy friend would say head start and i would say, wrong. no evidence that it works. the most effective government programs in sort of chronological order. social security. the g.i. bill in 1944. and medicare in 1965. now, there will be some pushback about that.

even u.s.a. today had an editorial that said, social security is a pay as you go program. no, it's not. it can never go broke. provided that you don't take the trust fund and spend it on government debt, which is what we have done for 60 years. but social security all but ended poverty among those over 65. medicare has all but ended significant healthcare problems among those over 65. and the g.i. bill gets very little credit in 2012 for being the key social policy that built the american middle class. american middle class was built on two basic components of the g.i. bill. access to education, affordable access to education, which was avoucher program. the g.i.s could go to any school they wanted to go to the money went to them and not the schools. the second was access to affordable housing.

if you roll the clock ahead to 2012, why is the middle class suffering? we don't have access to affordable high quality higher education. our students are taking on vastly too much debt. and my two sons, 38 and 34 years of age, who have good incomes, in one case more than mine -- cooperate even buy a house recently because the price of housing exceeds their income. and they're in the top 10% of income in the united states. that means housing is no longer accessible to the middle class. and when the middle class can't buy housing, the middle clarks as we have known it, since 1950, ceases to exist. so that's part two of the book. i've got programs that don't work, programs that do work, and then the intellectual challenge, which really took the longest period to get my head around, was, okay, if you know that these programs don't work and you've got a good fix on why,

and you know these programs do work and you have a good fix on why, are you capable of developing a social program or a blueprint for a program that would work? and that turned out to be quite tricky. you would like to have -- help children. you would like to deal with social disadvantage of children, and the road block is simply not in the political wards, whether you're on the left of center, right of center, or right on the center. our government is not about to help children by directing significant social resources to their parents. so, one of the reasons most of our social programs fail is we give so little to the parents and it really doesn't overcome much in the way of social disadvantage. so that stopped me cold. so i said, how do you help children if you can't get the money to them before they're 18?

the end result was, you can't. you have to wait until they're 18. and so i begged and borrowed and adapted the notion of a futures account, which, based on the prim that every year a child is alive you will deposit $3,000 into a futures account. at age 18 the child would have access the futures account, the adult now, or lon logical adult would have access to the futures account. and you can use the money for two things, not surprisingly, access to higher education. doesn't have to be a university. just post secondary education, and/or use the money for housing. it would accumulate to about $54,000 a year, which not coincidentally is what it would cost you for one year at penn or four years as a state supported institution, and $54,000 interestingly enough is 20% -- a little bitern 2340% for

the median selling price of a house. -- 20% of the median selling price of a house in the united states. so it's the new gib bill for american children. in 2005 it's -- 2012. it's not meaned tested. everybody gets it. and it would do two things. one, although i can't help children from zero to 18, i can at least reset the game at age 18. it's a restart. so, what all of the disadvantage that happened until 18, at least at 18 you have the financial where wonderful to all be a home owner or getted a advanced education. the second aspect of it is to rebuild the middle class. i just don't see any social policies on the horizon -- the election is over. we have heard everything the candidates had to say. not one said anything

intelligent about, this is how you rebuild the american middle class. so, little tiny book. not all that think. tells three stories. what doesn't work, and why it doesn't work, what does work, and why it does work, what could work and how to make it work. >> host: professor gelles, do you come at this from a liberal or conservative point of view? you mentioned fox news. >> guest: practical. i've worked in policy in washington. i've been a dean of the school of social policy. and i find that purple is my color. i'm not interested in taking an ideological point of view. i'm interest in results. and the danger of writing a book like this is -- i've already discovered it -- my extremely liberal friend wish i had never written the book and my extremely conservative friends which i didn't want to spend this much of the government money. if i can tick both sides off and

be true to the data, then i've done the book i wanted to do. >> oo the third lie is the name of the book, why government programs don't work and a blueprint for change. written by the university of pennsylvania's richard gelles, who serves as dean of the school of social policy and practice. thank you for your time today. >> thank you. >> for the next half year, bruce levine examines the effect of the civil war on economic and social structures. [applause]

>> thank you. happy you will be patient while i set up my regalia here. thank you all for coming out this evening. >> without further adieu let me get right into this. decades after the civil war ended, katherine stone, who we see on the screen, published her memoirs of what she called the gay busy life. that she and her wealthy slave-owning family had led on their 1200-acre plantation in prewar louisiana. the members of her family, she recalled, -- her words -- there was always something going on. formal dining, spend the days,

evening parties, riding frolics, fox hunts, and to assist with these and other diversions, katherine added her family had -- again, her words -- quite a corps of servants to keep us well waited on since, naturally, no one expected to wait on himself. katherine stone's younger brothers also -- again her words -- owned a little darky in the quarters who eventually become his body servant. and to generate the wealth that sustained the stone family's life of, again, her words -- luxurious ease, some 150 enslaved human beings toiled in the plantation's cotton and cane field, six days a week, week after week, month after month, year after year.

the civil war's outbreak in april of 1861 signaled the beginning of the end of the stone family's accustomed wealth and comfort. katherine was saying in her diary, the fighting between the nothing and south infected slave with the hope of rad change to their condition. they were therefore, she said, becoming lazy and disobedient and they were giving a lot of trouble, her words again, generally. one evening, as katherine and her relatives sat on the very landa of their plantation -- veranda of their plantation home, someone whom she described as runaway negro, darted past them, and katherine's brothers left for the pursuit, but the desperate fumetive made good his escape. the stones and their neighbors

began to worry that they were, in her words, living on a landmine. seeking refuge from these anxieties, catherine turned, she said to the fictional works of a then popular 19th century southern author, edgar allen poe oe. but she decided she was going avoid his most fearsome pieces, as she puts it. and perhaps -- we don't know -- but perhaps she chose the fall of the house of usher. well. it's not a particularly grisly story. it's not filled as are some other of the poe stories with grim super narl horrors which might have made this short story seem a relatively safe distraction from the unsettling events around her. that tv begins, you may

recall -- poes narrator is paying a visit to a friend, a man named roderick usher, who is the heir of an old wealthy and vennellable family and he is the current master of this imposing usher mansion. and at first glance this mansion's massive evidence, sayings the narrator, gave little token of instability. but its seeming sew liddity concealed a barely detectable fissure that ran down from the roof to the foundation. posted narrate for, after spending some time chatting with usher, suddenly hears the mansion's hidden structure fault begin to announce itself. first, in a muted tremor, then in a powerful shudder, and then a mounting roar.

and finally, as the narrate for watches in shock and horror are the mansion's walls begin to tremble. it's barclay discernible fissure games way open. the walls tumble. the mansion collapsed, burying its owner in the rubble. and the waters of the lake that surround the mansion then close, poe says, solemnly and silently over the fragments of the house of usher. katherine stone chose this book to relieve her of her anxieties. i would imagine it wound up offering her relatively little comfort. because in fact she, too, after all, resided in an imposing and outwardly sturdy structure. the house of dixie. the slavery based society of the american south.

and hers, too was already beginning to display the deep fissures that ran through it, and as the civil war continued, those fissures were going to widen until the whole structure eventually collapsed. some of the fissures that ran through the house of dixie and that the civil war greatly widened, divided white southerners from one another. the pro-confederate war effort eroded white unity in the south by demanding too much of it. demanded too much of some slave owners, especially those in the hills and mountains, where resentment grew that the ever-heavier burdens of fighting this war to preserve slavery, were failing to accomplish their goal and mean while were falling disproportionately on those with less of a stake in that war. but the war effort also proofed

do demanding in the eyes of many members of the southern elite. who proved to be too concerned with safeguarding their individual wealth and privileges to cooperate fully with a confederate government struggling to protect the interests of slave owners as a whole. and those are aspects of the book that i'm discussing with you today. but i'd like to talk to you about the most important fissure that ran through the house of dixie, slavery. and the three ways that slavery figured in the origin and the progress of the civil war. first of all, as the war's central cause. secondly, as a crucial force of military power deployed during that war. and third, slavery's erosion during the war and its destruction, both of those

things as an eventual union gold. the destruction of slavery as an eventual cons, deliberate union goal. so let's start with cause. as you may know, in a recent national survey, half of all those people -- half of all those americans who were polled denied that slavery was the main cause of the u.s. civil war. and that view is apparently gaining ground, not losing ground, because among younger people polled, those below 30 years of age, fully three out of five denied slavery centrality the war's origins. but in 1860 and '61, leaders of the union and confederacy knew and slade that slavery and the escalate national dispute over slavery's future was precisely what was leading most of the southern states to break from and break up the united states.

there are -- thereby initiating the costliyest war in the nations history. abraham lincoln noted one section of our country believes right and ought to be extended and the other believes it us wrong and ought to be extended -- sorry -- and ought not to be extended and this is the only substantial dispute. period. close quote. the president of the confederate states of america, jefferson davis, reminded his congress in 1861 -- these are with words -- the labor of african slaves was and is indies expensable to our spot spirit so that with interest of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled by the election to the presidency of an antislavery man like abraham lincoln, the people of the southern states, he said, were driven to the adoption of some

course of action to avert the danger with which they were openly menaced. and that course of action, of course, was leaving the federal union. davis was not overstating the stakes for him and his fellow slave owners the more than 12 million souls who resided in the southern states in 1860, nearly one out of three of those people was enslaved. was owned outright by other people. and on the markets of the day, those nearly four million human beings were worth something like $3 billion. that was an immense sum at the time. it was a sum greater than the value of all the farm land and all the states of the south. it was a sum fully three times as great as the cost of constructing all the railroads

that then ran throughout all the united states. i'll fifth you some idea of just what those human body were worth. even more important to southern wealth than the sale price of these human bodies, was the very profitable group of crops that the slaves could produce for their masters and made up the core of the southern economy. only slave labor, only the labor of people who were owned outright by their owners, by the land owners, who had no right to object, much less to refuse, the conditions under which they were compelled to work. only slave labor would cultivate those crops intensively and cheaply enough to yield the tremendous profits that they did. but slavery importance to the southern elite was not a matter

of dollars and cents to many masters, as slave owners like liked to be called, slavery seemed to be an irreplaceable fixture of society. it was inseparable from everything they knew and loved. it was inseparable from all aspects of what they referred as to their way of life. of course, economically, but also socially and culturally. slavery was a unique basis of the particular outlook, the assumptions, the norms, the habits, the relationships to which these masters had become deeply and reflexively attached. it shaped their culture, shaped their religion, and shaped their individual personalities. so slavery was central to southern life. but slavery was also an institution, a form of property, that contained a problem. a problem for the masters.

this valuable form of property was capable of thinking. capable of yearning for freedom. and capable of acting upon that yearning. this man, joshua speed, a kentucky slave owner, who is a friend of abraham lincoln's, put it this way. slave property is unlike any other. it is the only property in the world that has loco motion and a behind to croyle. and he went ton say that whys the owners of such property are so sensitive about any outside interference with it. their masters fear left them convinced their labors could be kept, controlled, and worked profitably only if they were

kept uneducated, uninformed, isolated from dangerous influences, closely watched, intimidated, and convinced that their status as slaves was permanent and unchangeable. to accomplish that, so-communities and state legislatures made it a crime to teach slaves to read, severely limited slaves' movements off their owners' property, created and beefed up slave patrols to enforce those limits. severely restricted the freedoms of the small community of free blacks who lived in the slave states and made it ever more difficult, even for whatever masters might choose to do so, to voluntarily free even their own slaves. to keep slaves convinced that both escape and resistance was hopeless forever more, required

that the white population bede pend blue and visibly united in support of black servitude, and ready to enforce that servitude, because to allow the appearance and allow the spread of antislavery sentiments among the white population, white disspell the aura of inevidentability, impregnancy with which slave owners tried to surround that institution, and if that happens it would surely encourage slaves to test, to resist, and openly to challenge their masters' power. but as the years passed, keeping just the south solid with slavery didn't seem to be enough. they also had to curb the rights and political power of wrong-thinking whites who lived in the north, and that became an even bigger problem.

because by the time of the american revolution, the north had embarked on a path of economic and social development that differed markedly and differed increasingly from that of the south. the combination of small farms, lively internal commerce, growing urban and manufacturing sectors, seemed less compatible with slavery, more compatible with self-employment and with the hiring of legally free laborers, and in the north, just as the south, the particular forms that economic and social development took also strongly influenced people's values. valueses of all kinds, philosophical, religious, political. northerners came to view personal autonomy for all men, and above all the ownership of one0s own body as a building block of any good society, and the outright ownership of one

human being by another, in contrast, came to seem more and more to those northerners, economically backward, but also morally repugnant and politically dangerous to the republic. well, of course southern leaders felt threatened by those northerners 0, who were the most strongly and most openly critical of slavery, and believed that the words and deeds of such northerners might, one way or another, directly or indirectly, again, encourage slaves to tug at their bonds. so the masters and their allies, therefore, set out to mute the voice of those troubled northerner, by purging antislavery literature from the united states mail, and as long as possible they banished antislavery petitions and even antislavery speeches from the floor of the house of

representatives. in 1850, they demanded and they got a new law that compelled northern citizens to join posses that were hunting people accused of being runaway slaves who had allegedly escaped into the free states. most of all, the champions of slavery sought ways to retain colts they had almost continuously exercised over the federal government since the american revolution, and to prevent, above all, others from using the federal government in ways that might harm the slave owners' interests. in doing this, by the way, they were greatly aided be a clause of the constitution, the so-called three/fifths clause that gave southern whites much heavier representation in the house of representatives than

their own numbers otherwise would have warranted. southerners also sought to increase their representation in both houses of congress and the electoral congress by steadily increasing the number of slave states in the union. and so it was during 1840, that they vociferously demanded and lustily cheered both the annexation of texas and then war with mexico, which, incidentally, removed and transferred to the united states fully half of the national terrain of mexico, and southerners cheered this war in hopes that the land so acquired would become slave-worked land. then, in 1854, they pressured congress into allowing slavery to take root in federally owned territories that congress explicitly closed to slavery 30

years later. the kansas and nebraska territory, acquired during the louisiana purchase. then, during the years that followed ex-northerners watched in horror as proslavery forces in kansas imemployed oppressive laws and extra legal violence to suppress their local opponents and critics. in 1857, a supreme court dominated by southerners and pro-south democrats, ruled in the famous dread scott case that all federal territories were automatically and permanently and irreversibly open to slavery and its expansion into this territories. this is a massive, rather single-minded, and pretty successful campaign to shore up slavery in the decades before the civil war. but this campaign failed to

smother the sectional conflict. on the contrary, it escalated it. it eventually convinced most northerners that southern power meant northern weakness. southern control of the national government meant infringement on northern interests and northern liberties. and that, therefore, only a political party dedicated to stopping the expansion of slavery and containing and rolling back the political domination of the federal government, by the slave owners and their allies, could protect the rights of the people of the north. that is what the republican party came into existence to do. its platform specifically promised to exclude slavery from all federal territories, as you well may know, and republican office herolds made clear that if elected, they would turn that promise into government policy. important to emphasize at this

point, i think, that this issue of slavery in the territories was not confined in its significance to those territories. on the contrary, in the eyes of both slavery supporters and its opponents, slavery's expansion was intimately connected to the future of slavery where it already existed, because both sides of this controversy firmly believe, for both economic and political reasons, that slavery needed to expand in order to survive. much as a shark, it is said, needs to keep moving in order to keep breathing. leading republicans, frankly and openly, for example, hoped that containing slavery geographically would eventually kill it within the states where it already existed, would in effect choke it to death. by preventing slavery from expanding into the territories,

abraham lincoln repeatedly stated, in his debates with frederick doug losses -- with steven doug loss, and other occasionness the late 1850s, by containing it, we mean, he said to put it in the course of this ultimate extinction, and when lincoln finally ran for president, he made at it central part of his campaign literature. he wasn't hiding this point of view. on november 6, 1860, more than 1.8 million voters, nearly all of them northerners, elected lincoln president of the united states to most whites in the deep south, the fact that the northern population was big enough and hostile enough to slavery to put such a man in and his party in control of the executive branch of the federal government, that fact seemed the

final proof that slavery was no longer safe within the united states. during late 1860 and early 1861, for that reason, the seven states of the deep south colored on the map in dark blue, all declared themselves out of the union, and they made no bones about why they were leaving. one after another of them specifically identified the north's hostility to slavery as the source of the grievance that was making them depart. and no one put the stakes more bluntly than the rich mississippi planter, richard thompson archer. it is time, archer said, for all good southerners to stand -- his words -- united in defense of the god-given right to own the african. end quote. the official secession documents just state the same sent

independent more polite legal language. now, eight other slave states, who had closer ties with the union, remained within the union, and those are the states colored on the map in front of you in gray and light blue. but four of those states, the ones in gray, arkansas, tennessee, virginia, and north carolina, threatened to follow the states of the lower south out the door, unless the newly elected president explicitly abandoned the platform on which he had just been elected. lincoln, they declared, must guarantee that slavery could in the future expand into all or part of the federal territories, and by the way, not only those territories currently held, but also territories yet to be acquired. and that demand was made with an

eye on eventually acquiring cuba, parts of central america and other parts of the caribbean, which were expected to be turned into slave-holding territories and slave-holding eventually states. if lincoln did not agree to do this, they said, they would very likely move to join the confederacy as well. well, lincoln and his party refused to these demands and when in april of 1861, the confederacy's bombardment, sparked all-out war, these four upper south states did choose sides. they connect this war between a slave labor confederacy and free labor union was going to eventually and inevitably evolve into a war over slavery itself,

and in a war like that, the leaders of these four slave states decided, they would stand with their sister slave states in defense of what they liked to call their peculiar institution. and so it was that a conflict over slavery expanded into a conflict over the territorial integrity of the nation itself. lincoln's government considered the attempt to break up the federal union to be illegal, to be treasonous, and by badly weakening the u.s., utterly unseasonable. and on that question, preservation of the union, the need to defend the state's of the united states from an armed attempt to destroy it as a nation, the vast majority of those people who lived in the free states, republicans and nonrepublicans alike, agreed wholeheartedly with lincoln and his party. he and his government, thereby,

and therefore, raised an army to resume their property places in the union. the next question then was, exactly how to fight that war. the republican government, we need remember, embarked upon the war not intending to lose the -- use the war itself to transform the south. the purpose of the union war northwest the eyes of its republican government, was simply to keep the slave states within the union, and a union in which the republicans could then proceed with their plan to slowly, gradually, peacefully, and with compensation, eventually do away with slavery. methods that, by the way, had that been the way slavery came to an end, they would have allowed some people to remain in

slaveriry through the end of. the 19th center or later. that how gradual emancipation worked in the 19th century. lincoln re-affirmed his commitment to the socially conservative war program in december of 1861, in his annual message to congress. saying, as you see on the screen, in considering the policy to be adopted in suppressing the incentury rex, i have been anxious and care the conflict shoal not descend into a revolutionary struggle. the union must be preserved, he continues, but we should not be in paste to determine that radical and extreme measures are indies spencible to preserve it. ...